iReport

[CMPE 277] - Android Application to Clean Cities

iReport is an Android application that can help contribute towards the cause of reducing litter in an effort to be environmentally compliant. This app focuses on monitoring and identification of litter by assisting people to report incidents of littering to the City of San Jose. City officials designated to monitor the littering in the city can then go to sites of littering and make sure proper disposal means are implemented to eliminate the litter. The notion behind this implementation is that a better monitoring practice can be enforced by people themselves who can help populate a list of littering incidents and monitor the status of the litter. All of this can be done while a person is on their daily commute and the app is designed so that it is quick and easy and does not take up too much of the user’s time.

By enabling the general populations’ contributions toward waste identification and following precautionary efforts, this app can enable companies in the future to successfully identify safer means of disposal and take quicker actions at reducing the waste at hand.

YouTube Link - https://youtu.be/qZjT86_nA-E

Technologies Used

1. Amazon EC2 “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.” (Amazon EC2, n.d.) The team decided to use this service to run our servers as most of the members have previous experience using this service.

2. mongoDB “MongoDB (from humongous) is a free and open-source cross-platform document-oriented database program.” (MongoDB, n.d.) The team decided to use this service since mongoDB is scalable, robust and is user friendly when setting up an environment.

3. Firebase Authentication “Firebase Authentication provides backend services, easy-to-use SDKs, and ready-made UI libraries to authenticate users to an app.” (Firebase, n.d.) The team used this in order to authenticate residents using their Facebook login and officials using their Gmail login credentials.

4. Google Maps Google Maps is Android’s native map application and the team will be using APIs from Google Maps in order to implement features like Mapview and Heatmaps within the app.

5. Node.js “Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for developing a diverse variety of tools and applications.” (Node.js, n.d.)

6. Cloudinary Cloudinary allows developers to seamlessly manage their website's images in the cloud - image upload, cloud storage, image manipulation, image API and fast CDN. (Cloudinary, n.d.) The team will be using Cloudinary in order to store and retrieve images submitted by users in the cloud.

7. Android Studio “Android Studio is the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Android platform development.” (Android Studio, n.d.) Since all members in the team have experience with Android Studio, an initial decision was made to develop this app for the Android environment using Android Studio.